Making a decision about early childhood options for your child can be daunting. So many services to choose from, so many opinions about what’s best. Using a decision matrix can help to make that choice just a little easier.

With a decision matrix you use a table set up with each criterion given a weight depending on its importance in the decision and with each alternative given a ranking for that criterion. Confused yet? It’s not that complicated really and once you’ve mastered this tool, you will find it can be helpful in making many future decisions.

To help explain the process, I will talk you through it step by step.

First thing to do is to decide what criteria is important to you in choosing a service for your child. These criteria will be unique to you. Let’s say we have a parent, Molly, who is trying to make a decision whether to keep her three-year old Sarah at Playcentre or use a different service. She discussed it with her partner and together they decided that the following criteria is most important to them in making this decision:

Children of the same age

Community relationships

Provide care options

Provide structured learning time

Parent involvement

Low adult to child ratios

Health and safety

Emotional well-being

Not all these criteria has equal importance to Molly, so the next step is to weight them according to importance to her. Using a scale to weight the criteria helps to make more consistent judgments:

1-2: Not at all important

3-4: Not too important

5-6: Somewhat important

7-8: Quite important

9: Really important

10: Deal breaker

Molly weighted her criteria as follows

Children of the same age [currently there are only a few children at Sarah’s Playcentre in her age group; weight = 6]

Community relationships [building relationships with other in their own community; weight = 8]

Provide care options [it’s not that important right now, but might be more important in six months when Molly is expecting a second baby; weight = 5]

Low adult to child ratios [ratios are important to them as Sarah tends to thrive in close relationships; weight = 9]

Health and safety [a definite deal breaker; weight = 10]

Emotional well-being [another deal breaker; weight = 10]

Once she has weighted her criteria, the next step involved visiting the centres she is considering, talking to other parents and staff, observing children at the centre and finally scoring the centres on each of the criteria. Once again using a scale for your rankings will help you to make more consistent judgments.

1-2: Not at all

3-4: Not really

5-6: It’s okay

7-8: Looking good

9: Loving it

10: Perfection!

Once she has scored the centres, it’s time for some basic arithmetic:

multiply the centre score with the criteria weighting

add the weighted scores up

and you can see which provider will best meet you and your child’s needs. Easy as 1-2-3.